Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  This version’s main difference from the standard Raymonda was Rudolf’s enhancement of the role of Abderakhman. Establishing once again the concept of an Odette-Odile duality, he added new solos that would bring out the Saracen’s savage magnetism and explain Raymonda’s attraction to him. “Abderakhman is a sex symbol,” Rudolf remarked, meaning that he excites the heroine in a way that Jean does not. Working on the variations with Jean Guizerix, Rudolf demonstrated examples of Caucasian folk dancing, and tried to instill the kind of exotic, animal sensuality he himself had exuded in Le Corsaire and La Bayadère—a style of choreography that, as Guizerix says, is “très Solor.” (Charles Jude would have far preferred the role of Abderakhman to that of Jean, whose personality he describes as “nulle.”)

  Without exception the dancers remember the experience of working with Rudolf on Raymonda as an absolute joy, and after the first rehearsal had expressed their appreciation by applauding him. The Ministry of Culture’s Igor Eisner was no less enthusiastic.

  Très cher Rudolf,

  You have just given us a great and vigorous ballet dignifying both the Opéra and the name of Petipa. Powerful enough for the French to learn at last to look at dance. The company has been marvelous: it already owes you a great deal.

  Marie-Suzanne Soubie was not alone in thinking “tout nouveau, tout beau”—that it was all too good to last. For this albeit brief moment Rudolf was more content than ever before. “I have finally found a nest where I can relax,” he admitted. “I feel good here.” The cradle of classical ballet, Paris, he realized, was “the best place in the world to have a company.” It was the company Balanchine had twice come close to running.* Moreover, by a balletic divine right of succession it was where Rudolf belonged (Petipa, a student of the Paris legend Auguste Vestris, was replaced at the Maryinsky by Nicolai Legat, teacher to Alexander Pushkin).

  Rudolf’s contract required him to reside six months a year in Paris, but this was no hardship. He never tired of the view opposite 23 quai Voltaire—the bouquinistes stalls along the embankment, the view of the Louvre through regimented plane trees, the tinge of its stone changing from gray to gold depending on the light. And although his short journey to work was always a last-minute rush, it was a constant source of pleasure—the avenue de l’Opéra running in a wide straight line directly to the Palais Garnier, whose ornate baroque facade, magnificent cupola, and winged golden statuary provide one of the world’s most exquisite architectural vistas.

  At the end of an afternoon, he often spent time in Gilberte Cournand’s La Danse, a specialist bookshop and gallery on the rue de Beaune, around the corner from quai Voltaire. As one of France’s most acute voices on ballet, the critic was not only excellent company but had been delighting Rudolf since 1961 with her collection of dance figurines, books, prints, and costume designs. He also loved to roam the sixième’s Carré Rive Gauche, the antiquarian quarter, each shop like a salon in the Carnavalet Museum, with its display of ancient ceramics, statues, plinths, Chinoiserie, Aubusson rugs, Renaissance tapestries, inlaid cabinets, and ornate clocks. Antique collecting had become Rudolf’s “next passion,” and, aware of this, some shop owners would put objects in their windows that might tempt him before closing for the night. “They knew that after a performance he used to ‘faire du lèche vitrine.’ ” He even began “dancing for the furniture he wanted to buy,” asking Tessa Kennedy to arrange for the dealer to come to the theater to collect his money. “He said, ‘Now I’ll be thinking of that wardrobe when I’m onstage—it will inspire me!’ ” The pride of his collection was the nineteenth-century Russian furniture of Karelian birch, the arched and ebonized bibliothèque, the chairs, tables, cabinet, bed and canopy, ormolu-mounted and upholstered in Caucasian kilims. “I have only one dream. Always the same. That one day I can receive my mother here. It’s her I am waiting for.”

  But it was Rosa who was now with Rudolf, staying in his quai Voltaire guest room overlooking the Seine. Her “husband,” Pierre François, had spotted her one day on quai de la Mégisserie, and was about to greet her, French fashion, with a kiss on each cheek, when Rosa instinctively recoiled as if fearing assault. Pierre suggested that she come home with him to meet his long-term partner, “but Rosa was afraid that Mengia might hit her.” He managed to persuade her, and the three spent an awkward hour trying to make themselves understood, Pierre noting how “the brutal change in her way of life, language, country, social level had given her an air of being almost drunk with it all.” They urged Rosa to visit them whenever she cared to, but he did not see her again. “Only Rudolf interested her,” Pierre says, a situation her brother was already regretting.

  Very quickly Rosa took his affairs in hand and considered all people gravitating around him as rivals, swindlers, or parasites. She filtered all the comings and goings and rebuked Rudolf on his way of life and his frequentations. So Rudolf then put her in the studio upstairs, but as she continued to make his life impossible, he sent her to La Turbie with a monthly allowance on condition that she never came back to Paris.

  Rudolf’s niece Gouzel was also proving a problem. He had wanted to do the best for her when she arrived in Paris, taking her to shop at Saint Laurent, and subsidizing French lessons. He believed she was bright enough to go to the Sorbonne, but Gouzel had other ideas—as Maude witnessed one night at the quai Voltaire apartment: “Gouzel kept saying, ‘Nyet, nyet, nyet,’ and finally, Rudolf turned to me and said, ‘Maude, isn’t she wrong? I want her to go back and learn something—whether it’s history of art or whatever, just so she has a knowledge of something. But she says it’s boring and she won’t do it.’ ”

  Rudolf had turned to several friends for help, asking Tessa to employ her in the interior design company she owned, and Jeannette to give her temporary work as a waitress in Tosca’s, her fashionable San Francisco bar. “But she was too lazy,” Jeannette recalls. “Her uncle was famous; why should she make something of herself? Why not just live in the apartment he’d given her and enjoy her life?” Having left her husband, Gouzel was looking “to meet men,” asking Tessa if she knew of any bars to which she could go. “I said I’d try to find out from my children.” Stories of this kind were filtering back to Rudolf, who told Gouzel angrily, “You’re damaging me.” In despair he telephoned Armen, who was then working in San Francisco’s Immigration Department. “Do anything,” Rudolf begged her. “You’ve got to send them back!” “But I told him, I can’t start asking for your relatives to be deported just because you’re disillusioned, because you made a mistake by bringing them in.” And yet she realized how upset Rudolf was to discover the unbreachable cultural gap that now existed between him and his family. “When Rosa came she was a different person. He saw a different Rosa, a different Gouzel.… Wild, not polished.” “These people speak a different language,” he told Armen, laughing dryly. “Do you know I’m absolutely convinced that we come from the wolves.”

  Rudolf himself now knew everyone there was to know in Paris society. He had become a member of Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s court, spending several Christmases at Ferrières, their massive belle epoque château on the upper Seine, and dining at the Hôtel Lambert, their seventeenth-century Paris town house. Not even kings could afford Ferrières—Wilhelm I of Prussia is said to have remarked, “It could belong only to a Rothschild”—while the Hôtel Lambert, built on the Île Saint Louis by the architect of Versailles, and restored to its former glory by Marie-Hélène’s friend Alexis de Rédé, had one of the most sumptuous domestic interiors in all Paris. To be invited to a Rothschild soirée was in itself an education in ancien-régime elegance, the kind of opulence unchanged from that Flaubert describes when Frédéric, the young hero of L’éducation sentimentale, encounters le beau monde for the first time. He is enraptured by the great candelabra reflected in the mirrors, the footmen in gold braid, the buffet “looking like the high altar of a cathedral” with its display of silver platters and iridescent cut glass.

  Rudolf rarely refu
sed an invitation to the Hôtel Lambert, particularly as he had grown extremely close to Marie-Hélène. A mix of American and European cultures, the wife of Guy de Rothschild was no beauty, but with her couture clothes and reddish gold hair coiffed by Alexandre, she had great personal style. Her aesthetic sense and extraordinary attention to detail had found expression in the legendary costume balls she gave at Ferrières. The haute cuisine and great wines Rudolf had sampled with the Rothschilds began influencing the dinners he gave at quai Voltaire; a typical menu of quenelles with lobster accompanied by Le Montrachet or Roederer Cristal was far more extravagant than anything he had served before. Marie-Hélène was proving as formative to his taste as Lee Radziwill had been in his youth, and as a friend could be equally demanding. “She expected complete loyalty. You had to worship her or not see her at all.” With Rudolf, however, it was Marie-Hélène who did the worshipping, her esteem so profound that she viewed him as quasi divine—“an instrument in the hands of a higher being, come to earth not to give life meaning but to reveal its mystery.… Celui-la, il faudrait s’incliner réligieusement devant lui, et lui donner un autre nom: ‘l’inter-prêtre.’ ”

  They were together at a grand dinner one night given by Princess Margot Aliatta; Rudolf sat on Marie-Hélène’s right, and on her left was Jimmy Douglas, an urbane young American expatriate. Finding it a strain to keep Marie-Hélène amused—“She was like Louise de Vilmorin, she took everything out of you”—Jimmy was glad when Rudolf persuaded him to leave. “He kept telling me how bored he was, and wanted me to take him to le Trap, which was a low dive good for adventures.” Opening at midnight and signaling its existence on rue Jacob with an ice blue neon sign saying “Bar,” le Trap was much like any other gay cruising venue. “Pinball machines. A garish jukebox. Just a touch too much red light.” Announcing, “I know where to go,” Rudolf made straight for le Trap’s “stairway to paradise,” disappearing for about an hour into a warren of little back rooms. Jimmy, meanwhile, sat waiting for him at the bar:

  I had fallen by chance on an extremely attractive boy and when Rudolf came down he showed that he would really like to meet him, so I introduced them. Rudolf was delighted. “You’re wonderful!” he said, and gave me a big kiss, sticking his tongue right into my mouth. He was doing it to be funny, but it turned out to be a very bad thing for me, because in a couple of days I came down with some terrible virus. For two months I ached all over and had fevers, and none of the doctors knew what it was. I feel it was definitely something Rudolf gave me; he was doing a lot of things up there in the dark. Many people I knew caught AIDS upstairs at le Trap.

  At the Institute Verne, a clinic devoted mostly to gay men, patients with symptoms of the new disease were arriving in increasing numbers. “It started with one, two, then ten, twenty.… And very quickly we understood that we were going to be overwhelmed by this.” Rudolf’s young doctor, Michel Canesi, worked there part-time and realized that he, like everyone else at the institute, was on the frontline. He kept in almost daily contact with a colleague at Claude-Bernard Hospital who was one of very few in their profession to take seriously “la prétendue maladie d’homos.” In June 1981, Willy Rozenbaum, a thirty-three-year-old specialist in infectious and tropical diseases, had received a patient, a ship steward, suffering from a rare strain of pneumonia. The doctor had just read in the weekly review of Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control its now famous account of five young homosexuals afflicted with this same pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and as more information appeared over the year he became convinced that GRID was already present in France. By 1982, with no more than a few dozen cases in the country, the disease was still considered marginal, and Rozenbaum found himself struggling constantly against the incredulity and inertia of his colleagues. There was also considerable prejudice against the frequent presence of homosexuals at Claude-Bernard. Rozenbaum succeeded in finding a new post at La Pitié—Salpêtrière, and with several like-minded physicians formed a small group with the intention of working together to isolate the agent responsible for SIDA (syndrome immunodéficitaire acquis), as it became known in France.

  One night at the beginning of February 1983, Canesi was having dinner with Rozenbaum and another dermatologist from the Institute Verne. “Willy told us about a phone call he’d received that day from Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute. He’d sent a sample of a lymph node from one of his patients, and Montagnier was calling to say that he thought he might have found something new.” A specialist in human retroviruses, Montagnier had begun to suspect that the AIDS virus existed not only in the blood but in the lymph nodes, a theory that Rozenbaum’s biopsy (taken from a young male homosexual) had confirmed. “Something’s happened,” Montagnier told him. “We’ve identified the activity of a retrovirus. We have to talk.” They began to collaborate, and four months later Rozenbaum sent another sample from a young gay male known as LAI (after his initials). LAI’s lymph node was invaded by Kaposi’s sarcoma cells, and when cultivated, the virus multiplied very quickly. “It would become famous in fact, since this strain was to be used the world over.” By the end of 1983 the human retrovirus Montagnier had christened LAV (lymphadenopathy associated virus) would come to be known as the agent of AIDS.

  It was shortly after this, at the beginning of 1984, that Michel Canesi sent Rudolf to see Rozenbaum. Although a test would not be commercialized for another year, the Pasteur Institute had developed a prototype from LAI’s lymphocytes that detected the presence of antibodies specific to AIDS patients. Using the name “Mr. Potts” (Wallace’s surname), and entrusting Marie-Suzanne Soubie with the task of driving him to La Pitié-Salpêtrière, Rudolf had his first consultation with Rozenbaum. A puckish man with tight curly brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Willy Rozenbaum believes “le secret médical” to be paramount, and therefore refuses to discuss his association with Rudolf, but the memoir he wrote about his pioneering work* reveals someone not only passionate about his vocation but exceptionally nonjudgmental. Marie-Suzanne remembers his intensity on that first occasion, as he impressed on her the need for total secrecy. “He said, ‘This could be very serious: are you going to help him?’ But I knew already that Rudolf needed someone who would have died rather than say anything.”

  Rozenbaum called Canesi to tell him that the test was positive, and Canesi in turn broke the news to their patient. Hearing what he felt he already knew, Rudolf was concerned but not unduly so, particularly as it was thought at the time (wrongly) that AIDS developed in no more than 10 percent of “séropositif” patients. He found himself in what Rozenbaum describes as “that strange state where people are at the same time in good health, perhaps soon [to be] sick, but ‘dangerous’ because capable of transmitting the virus.” When Rock Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS a few months later, he sent anonymous letters to his three most recent sexual contacts suggesting that they have tests done “to make sure you’re ok.” Rudolf, however, had no regular partner and would have been hard pressed to track down his multiple casual encounters. He and Robert Tracy had split up in the summer of 1981, and although they had since got back together (Rudolf installing the young dancer as a kind of chatelaine in his Dakota apartment), the relationship was now, in Robert’s words, “The same—except no sex.”

  The only people Rudolf told were two of his closest colleagues. At the beginning of February he had a dinner after an Opéra Comique performance with a small group including André Larquié, president of the Paris Opéra, who had helped to “cook the arrival of Rudolf,” and subsequently had become a good friend. “At one point in the evening Rudolf turned to me and said, ‘I am sick. Please call my doctor. He knows and Marie-Suzanne knows—that’s all.’ ” Larquié understood instantly what he meant. “We were very aware now of the problems of SIDA, and, of course, I knew the life of Rudolf.” The following day he called Canesi, who told him, “Yes, Rudolf wanted you to know that he is séropositif, but he’s well, so don’t worry. If I see any changes, I will tell you.”

 
It had been only a matter of months since AIDS researchers confirmed that the virus transmitted itself through semen or blood, but ignorance about contagion—fear even of shaking the hand of a “sidaique”—was to persist for years to come. This climate of anxiety also existed in the medical profession: Rozenbaum described a doctor who confessed to having burned his gloves, and asked if he should also burn the chair on which the patient had sat. Marie-Suzanne vows that at no point did she consider herself to be in danger—“It just didn’t enter my mind.” But Rudolf’s dread was that other colleagues would feel differently. “If I tell people, if the world knows that I am ill, dancers are afraid of me—they don’t want to work with me.” Maude, in whom Rudolf confided the following year, understood this only too well. “His professional life would have been finished. The press would never have left him alone. And he wouldn’t have been able to travel. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything. All he wanted to do was work. If he was going to die it would be onstage.”